


harder than god falls

by mestariteos



Series: when my time comes around (in my time of dying) [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s03e16 No Rest for the Wicked, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 22:03:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13133136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mestariteos/pseuds/mestariteos
Summary: “it’s hard to feign being okay when less than thirteen hours ago you were holding the still-warm corpse of your brother.” sam winchester is lonely after dean punches his one-way ticket downstairs. set just after 3x16 ‘no rest for the wicked’. title from ‘for my brother’ by mac demarco.





	harder than god falls

it’s hard to feign being okay when less than thirteen hours ago you were holding the still-warm corpse of your brother. the only family sam had left, really, unless he counted bobby (and in all respects he probably should), but now – for the first time in his life, sam was alone. the last winchester. even when he’d been at stanford, he’d been content with the knowledge that somewhere out there was his father and his brother, rattling around the country killing monsters in dean’s impala (his car now, sam supposed, and wasn’t that a depressing thought). now there was no one, no one to turn to – he could hunt (hunt lilith, that sonuvabitch, she deserved more than her head on a pike) with bobby, sure, but he didn’t think he could stand bobby’s pitying looks. he knew bobby was saddened by dean’s death, of course he was, bobby’d been a second (sometimes a first) father to them – but even bobby couldn’t understand what it was like to live with the knowledge that someone had not only died for you, but had had to die because he couldn’t stand that _you_ died in the first place.

a winchester’s life sure was a complicated thing.

sam stared at the ceiling of one of bobby’s spare rooms, the same one that he and dean always shared when they stayed here. unlike many of the motel rooms they’d stayed in over the years, there were no suspicious stains on the ceiling, nor ugly cracks in the walls. it was nice, cosy.

it was lonely.

half-formed thoughts spilled from wherever thoughts came from, that unknowable place: _i want. i need. i wish._ he didn’t bother finishing them – he knew what he wanted and what he needed and what he wished, and there was no use finishing these useless thoughts because what he wanted and needed and wished for were all the same thing and that thing was dead. dead and gone.

twelve and a half hours since dean was dragged to hell, eight hours since he and bobby buried him, six since they’d gotten back to sioux falls and sam had gone to his room without talking to or looking at bobby. without dinner or a shower, not even a beer. he missed dean, felt the loss of his brother like a deep heartache under his ribs, pressure in his lungs and throat. tears stung his eyes, but he couldn’t cry, couldn’t relieve some of that ache. he felt so damn _empty_ , hollow, like dean’s death had ripped a hole in him that could never been filled. he hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye, not really, not while dean was still breathing.

he still had grave dirt under his fingernails, pine box scent in his nose, dean’s blood staining his clothes.

he tried his best to ignore the empty bed sitting a few feet away. it wasn’t easy – it mocked him, stared at him, wanted him to look, wanted his attention and his grief. sam could feel the beginning of sleep pulling at his eyelids. it felt like heaven; it felt like a trap. he fought it off, tried to focus his thoughts on why he held a _get out of jail free_ card from lilith’s burning white light. he wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t, why would he get to sleep when dean’s body was rotting in a field and his soul was being tortured in the depths of hell? sam tried to think, tried to marshal his thoughts in the battlefield of his mind, but the fatigue of burying dean was pushing his body into the mattress, wrapping his brain in coils of exhaustion. it felt like a storm was coming, or had already been, or was happening right now. the sounds of the night crept through the window and over the salted windowsill into bobby’s spare room, lulled him into a dream, or a memory, or something born of the two.

_he was a child again, a floppy haircut limping in the heat of july. dean was there, laughing, only just past being a child himself, still with an accented tongue that pushed out vowels where there were none and a jacket that hung past his hips. fireworks crackled and spun in the night sky. it felt as though the stars had come to earth and put on a show just for the two of them. the heat pressed down on them, smoke drifted into their eyes and ears and throats, but this was the happiest he’d been in a long time, already sick of new schools, new motels, new people every two or three weeks. but now he was here, happy, with dean’s laughter and the sparkle of the dancing fireworks as the background track to their joy._

the stars outside the window twinkled as if in memory of that night, glinting off the impala where she sat in bobby’s yard. dean’s years-old laughter rang in his ears as the darkness finally sent sam into an exhausted sleep, the ghost of a time where grief did not exist. tomorrow would bring challenges, hardships and sorrow, but for now sam slept, caught in reminiscence, memories of dean and happiness. the two were the same, after all, hand in hand.

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell that i really liked the fireworks scene... i write about it all the time.  
> merry christmas, happy hanukka, happy pancha ganapati, happy yule, happy koliada, and happy holidays and any special religious days that i missed!


End file.
